It seems right that this blog should return in October: the month on which no one should turn their back! Full of change, ghosts, liminal spaces and spooky things. But also candy.
I’ve been working slowly and not very steadily on A Remarkable Rake, and then maybe about two months ago something kicked over in my brain and it’s somewhat plausible to imagine a finished book in the next little while? (KEYN AYIN HORA, SPIT SPIT SPIT.) The Times in Which We Find Ourselves make everything more uncertain, but one does one’s best. (It’s been… kind of a ride, hasn’t it?)
Early in A Remarkable Rake, our nonbinary hero, St. Clair, tells a ghost story to distract a couple of children who really need supper. (I may have some parenting stuff to work out on the page.) It’s an adaptation of a Bengali folk tale I first encountered when I was about 9, which then sat in my brain for 30 years, which is what it takes sometimes. When I finished adapting it, I really, really wanted to hear it aloud to see if it worked — as a character piece for St. Clair, and if it was true to its long-ago clever-scariness even as I tried to draw out the sting of that tale-collector’s colonialism — and it happens I know one of the East Coast’s best storytellers, but you can’t just ask people to make art for you. (I did ask, I am a damn pest.)
Sometimes, even in 2020, you get what you ask for, and hearing this small ghost story come to life was just… I squealed a lot. I may still be squealing. As a performance of my own work (WHAT?? HOW?!), it makes my little dramatist heart so happy. As a piece of autumnal magic from a highly skilled storyteller, it blows me away. (My kid has listened over and over.)
Click to listen because embedded audio in WordPress is only tsuris: In which St. Clair tells a ghost story on a dark, cold night
With thanks to the storyteller, the remarkably rakish Sonya Taaffe, and to Rob Noyes for his audio engineering and hosting.
In Print. On the Internet. Oh Dear. 
This was so gorgeous. I just love how St. Clair tells this story; it’s just perfect. More details in my comment on Sovay’s post, but in addition to what I mentioned there, I really loved “No Englishman’s ghost wishes to pass eternity in another Englishman’s kit bag.”–that made me laugh.
In the original folktale, is it an English ghost?
No, in the original it’s a Bengali man and a Bengali ghost, but based on what I’ve read about nabobs, a dead one would absolutely appropriate Bengali ghost-behavior as his own if he thought he could turn a ghost-profit. 🙂